Against the Structural Weight of Catastrophe: A Poetics of Negation

What form does the enormity of the Palestinian Catastrophe take, and by which political grammars is its ongoing condition disrupted and contested? Combining materialist critique with poetic interjections, the authors propose reading the Nakba neither as an isolated event nor a reified structure, but as a series of violent negations running parallel to the catalytic force of resistance. In doing so, they redirect focus from overdetermined theorizations of colonial violence to generative practices of refusal, cautioning against the structural heft and imposed permanence of settler-colonialism. As Palestinians have repeatedly shown, the colonial limit is not impenetrable. The booklet also critically engages with iterations of Palestine’s vanishing map, commonly circulated as a convenient summary of dispossession. These cartographic representations are reinterpreted as a negative image that comes into focus with each act of resistance, gradually processing as land and self are restored.